


another version of me

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Time Loop, character deaths but they don't stick, post-5x11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-29 01:45:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13916724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Daisy dies. Then she wakes up.





	another version of me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hamsterfactor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamsterfactor/gifts).



Coulson dies.

And then the world splits open.

And then she dies.

The last two are irrelevant because the first two are the same.

 

**&**

And then Daisy wakes up.

She knows where she is immediately. In all honesty she didn’t think Coulson would leave her behind. Her desperate attempts, her appeal to his logic, to let her stay in the future - she knew they’d be futile.

But this time it’s different. She knew? Coulson starts talking - he doesn’t apologize. And Daisy hesitates, because what he says sounds familiar. But this is the first time he uses those words, the first time in fact anyone tells her they wouldn't leave her behind. The first time anyone would use such nice words for her.

Yet she feels like she's heard them before. 

 

+++ 

 

“We could use you out there,” Coulson says, once again proving he doesn't believe in prophecies, or at least not one that says she's going to destroy Earth.

But she can't risk it.

She lets the team face their mission without her, because she is too scared Coulson is wrong.

Her stomach drops when she watches Elena go out the door, a terrible feeling lodging itself at the bottom like a stone or a curse - for some inexplicable reason. Like she should be stopping her and her alone. She sees herself getting up and grabbing Elena’s shoulder and keeping her here, but what she sees is a shadow crossing her vision. A ghost. She doesn't stand up. She lets the team go.

It's not until she hears May’s broken voice on the comms hours later that she understands what the feeling meant.

 

+++

 

“I could have stopped this,” she says when she finally works up the courage to stay more than five minutes in the room where they are treating Elena. There’s nothing for her to do at the moment, FitzSimmons talking some nonsense about Gravitonium, setting up another plan Daisy has the feeling - the same ache at the bottom of her stomach - will fail.

She says it in a low voice, almost a whisper, but she is aware enough that Coulson would hear her anyway.

“This wasn't your fault,” he says, like on cue. Not a premonition, just something Coulson would say.

“How many times can you say that line before not even you believe it?” Daisy wonders out loud.

“I was hoping if I said it enough times maybe you'd end up believing it,” he replies. Daisy turns around, looking at his face for the first time since they came into the room. “I guess I was wrong.”

“You were right about something, though,” Daisy says. “I was too afraid of what would happen. If I had gone with you I could have helped. This wouldn't have happened.”

“Or there'd be two beds in this room instead of one,” Coulson argues. “You can't know what you have happened.”

“But that's the thing. I _knew_.”

Coulson blinks, and Daisy knows he would believe her, if she were to tell him.

She shakes her head.

She touches her neck.

“We need to find a way to get my powers back,” she says.

 

+++

 

It's the wrong thing to do.

Everything she tries is the wrong thing to do.

And she tries so hard. The harder she tries the faster it all goes to hell, and the more she remembers.

She remembers going into the gaping hole in the middle of the universe before she even starts moving. She remembers Coulson, dying, and still trying to stop her, “Daisy, no", before he even reaches his hand to her arm, too weak to hold on. “Daisy, _Skye_ , no.”

She remembers dying.

Disappearing.

Over and over.

 

**&**

Daisy wakes up.

Knowing she’s no longer in the future.

“Sorry, am I boring you?” Coulson asks, sounding too amused for a dude who has just shot her.

“No, no, sorry,” she presses the back of her hand to her forehead. “That's… the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” she tells Coulson distractedly. That's why she doesn't mind that is the truth. “It's just that… have you ever experienced deja-vu?”

Coulson crosses his arms.

“Yeah, I have.”

Not like this, Daisy thinks.

 

+++

 

Before the team leaves she grabs Elena’s shoulder.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Daisy says. “Just be extra careful out there.”

Elena stares at her. Daisy knows “careful” is not exactly her specialty.

“I have a bad feeling,” she admits. “Do it for me, okay? The extra careful part?”

Her friend gives her a serious nod. There’s something heavy and new in her eyes. _She knows about Coulson_ , Daisy thinks all of the sudden.

 

+++

 

“I wasn’t fast enough,” Elena says, as they both stand guard besides Mack’s bed, machines pumping blood into him, the cut on his abdomen too severe, and no hospital they could take him without putting everybody in danger.

Daisy wraps her arm around Elena, knowing that she herself did this. She changed the future, but somehow she changed it for the worse.

And it doesn’t matter in the end.

 

+++

 

“I’m sorry,” she tells Deke. Deke, unlikely last line of humanity’s defense. Who ironically is going to be here, at the epicenter of the very thing that condemned him to live his life inside a nightmare. “I’m afraid your vacation on Earth is going to get cut short.”

Daisy wonders if he regrets it, having helped SHIELD, just for everything to end like this.

He shakes his head. “Are you kidding? I got to taste real beer. That was worth it.”

“Don’t give up so easily,” Coulson tells him, handing him one of those huge weapons kept in the back of the armoury. “Plenty of Earth stuff you still need to check out.”

Deke looks ridiculous, trying to carry a weapon bigger and heavier than he is, probably.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“Like coffee from a good espresso machine,” Daisy offers.

Coulson smiles.

“And strawberries,” he replies.

“Cactus cooler.”

“Blueberry pancakes.”

“And Little Debbie cakes.”

Deke rests the gun on the floor for a moment.

“Those all sound like food and drink. Does Earth have anything else?” he asks.

Daisy and Coulson look at each other, the slightest of smiles, the smallest of nods.

“A ride in Lola,” Daisy says.

Deke frowns.

“ _What?_?”

 

**&**

“I know you’re dying,” Daisy says, before she forgets, _this is important_. Maybe if she tackles this first, maybe if she changes the order of things. Maybe if they don’t go meet Piper. If they pick up Deke before the police does.

But she’s done that before.

She thinks.

It’s not like she remembers _clearly_ , that’s not how it works. Not yet anyone.

Just the feeling that all these ideas have occurred to her before, that she has tried these combinations before.

 

+++

 

Today she manages to save Elena before it all starts, she manages to save Mack, and then - then it’s Fitz’s and May’s turn, fighting the Kree.

What does it matter anyway, if in the end they all go. The moment Coulson runs out of time they all run out of time, and Daisy feels like she is just choosing which people she loves to sacrify first.

 

+++

 

She doesn’t remember what this room looks like.

They are sitting on the floor, she and Coulson, waiting for the last desperate stand against the forces of the universe. It sounds epic, if Daisy wasn’t goddamn tired. She is fixing the panels on one of the pod - right, now she remembers they made it back to the Playground, and this is some last minute plan - her fingers moving in the dark, everybody is gone except her and Coulson and it looks like a nightmare she had a long time ago.

“If I had been strong enough to stop Aida on my own, you wouldn’t have had to make a deal with the Ghost Rider and none of this would have happened,” she says.

Coulson chuckles.

Daisy raises an eyebrow.

“And if I had paid more attention to my team I might have noticed Fitz had been building a killer robot earlier, or that May had been replaced, and if and if and if…” he says. “If you try hard enough you can unravel it until it’s all your fault. You can’t live life like that.”

She scoffs. “Have you met _me_?”

Now they both chuckle, their heads close together as they work on the panel.

Gallows humor, Daisy guesses. What else do they have?”

“If nothing else,” Coulson says in a low, bright voice. “I’m really glad I got to meet you, Daisy. Skye.”

It means something, of course.

Something she doesn’t want to think about.

She doesn’t want to feel lucky that they met.

Because it means accepting it’s over.

 

**&**

She wakes up.

“You are here, you’re okay,” she says, twisting her hand into the front of Coulson’s jacket. He pulls back gently, quickling covering himself. She knows why, but she doesn’t care. She remembers him telling her that he was glad to have met her. She grabs his shoulders, letting him hold on to his terrible secret for a while longer. For a moment she doesn’t care about that. She doesn’t care about the Ghost Rider or the Kree or the Gravitonium or about the world splitting open. All that matter, _in this moment_ , is that Coulson is alive and here in from of her and under her arms and he didn’t stay dead and she has one more chance at keeping him with her.

 

**&**

She wakes up. “I have something to tell you.”

She tells him word by word what he was going to say to justify having ICEd her back there in the future. The word by word part disturbs him a bit. She didn’t need to do that, of course. It’s Coulson. He was going to believe her anyone. And she didn’t need to go through a time loop and get physical proof of that to know.

“Okay, let’s figure this out together.”

 

+++

 

“That’s stupid,” Fitz says when she tries to explain it to the rest. And well, fair enough, she can’t explain it in proper scientific terms. “What you are describing is either your consciousness travelling through parallel universes experiencing the same day, which is impossible, or we are all trapped in a limited time loop but only you can tell that’s what’s happening. Which is also impossible.”

Fitz doesn’t balk on it being impossible, but he hesitates when it turns out that Daisy’s prediction about Piper selling them out was true. And Simmons looks like, if she had time, she’d like to do some tests on Daisy to figure out what’s inside her head that enables her to do this. 

But there is no time.

Even knowing what’s going to happen they can’t stop the beacon.

Everything slips out of her hands again.

 

+++

 

“Do you have any idea of how many times I’ve tried to save you? Not the team, _you_ ,” she says, sitting in the dark with Coulson. There’s this pervasive the-world-is-ending mood that’s even reflected in the lightning. “How many times have I watched you die? Over and over?”

She feels his hand cover hers over the desk they are sitting on.

It’s the first warm thing she remembers since this started.

It hasn’t happened before.

But that means nothing-

It’s all variations on a theme, the details can change, the devil is in the big picture.

“Maybe you need to stop trying so hard,” she hears Coulson say.

She turns to face him, even though she can’t quite see his face in this darkness.

She feels betrayed.

“How can you ask me that?”

“Daisy, I made a deal,” he tells her. “That part is not changing. But no one else has to suffer for it.”

He squeezes her hand. It feels like a deeper betrayal.

“You have to let me go,” he repeats. “You haven’t tried that yet. Have you?”

Daisy doesn’t reply, she doesn’t _want_ to reply. But it’s Coulson, if anyone has ever read her face accurately.

“Maybe this is what you have to try,” he says.

She slips her hand from under his. But she nods. Thankful he can’t see the tears.

 

+++

 

In the end she can’t do it. Even if that’s what he wants. She goes down with him. The whole planet goes down with them. In the end she couldn’t let go of Coulson anymore than he could leave her stranded in the future. Even if that was what she wanted.

She gets it now.

She understands.

In those few seconds after Coulson dies, after the world is split open, Daisy Johnson understands a lot of things.

 

**&**

She wakes up.

Before Coulson can speak - “I know, and there is no universe in which I would leave _you_ behind,” she says and she presses her mouth to his.

“Daisy, what the-?”

“I’m going to prove it,” she says.

 

+++

 

She goes alone to find the beacon.

That’s first.

She makes everybody else stay behind.

She finds a way to take that freaking thing out of her neck, her powers rushing back, feeling like the first time she was able to control them, feeling like she could move a mountain. Yes, that’s it. Her mother taught her to move a mountain. And she’s Jiaying’s daughter through and through.

If she’s powerful enough to destroy Earth then… what anyone wouldn’t shake in their boots? Pun intended. Pun always intended. She’s her father’s daughter too.

She faces it all: the army, the Kree, the Gravitonium, ultimately the Ghost Rider.

This is the answer, she thinks.

Coulson said the world needed Quake. He said that she was just afraid of what might happen.

But what if she wasn’t afraid?

And what if she wasn’t alone facing the inevitable? What if the dozens of previous versions of Daisy, the ones who failed to save the world, the ones who failed to save what they loved, were here with her, pushing her forward, lending her their strength?

Then none of those versions would have been in vain. None of that heartbreak and anger would have been a waste. They were all necessary for Daisy, _this Daisy_ , to come to this point, to become the Daisy that can fix it all.

All the Coulsons that died too. Every tender word Coulson has said to her in all these iterations. They wouldn’t be lost, either. They were essential. Daisy can draw strength from them.

Every Elena, too. Every Mack. Every May, every Simons and every Fitz. Hell, even all those Dekes who have died, even those helped.

Daisy can feel them now, the voices of every Daisy who’s been trapped in this day with her. She can hear them whisper to her as she raises her hand.

_You can do this,_ , they say.

Daisy joins in, adding her own voice to the crowd.

You were always meant to do this.

 

+++

 

“So. That kiss…” Coulson starts.

“In my defense, I thought you wouldn’t remember.”

She looks down at the ground, watching Coulson’s hand dance into her field of vision and settle on her hip. Lifting her head in time to meet his lips.

 

+++

 

Late at night she resents the lull of the warmed up mattress, the soft and thick film of hair on Coulson’s arm, under her head. Her eyelids flutter, her body exhausted trying to win the battle.

“Keep me awake,” she tells Coulson. “I’m scared of falling asleep to find out that-”

“That you have to do it again?”

She nods.

“And I know I won’t get a better ending,” she says, pulling Coulson closer and closer, feeling his heartbeat like a miracle, thudding against the curve of her back. Daisy thinks about all the other Daisy who lived this day, but couldn’t get to this moment. They are here with her, somehow, in Coulson’s bed. Though she probably shouldn’t tell him that just yet. It’s a little early in the relationship for orgies.

Coulson’s lips brush her cheek as she smiles to herself.

“So...how does this work?” he asks. “Are you the Ghost Rider now?”

She shakes with laughter, Coulson’s other hand over her stomach. “I don’t think Robbie is ready to retire,” she explains. “I just made a better deal than yours.”

“That simple, uh?” 

“There was nothing simple about it,” she protests. 

It took her many tries.

It took many Daisys.

 

**&**

Daisy wakes up.

She’s _home_.

For a moment the feeling confuses her.

The strong smell of coffee.

She sits up.

Still in Coulson’s bed.

“I’m sorry,” Coulson says, pulling her hair off her face and handing her a mug. “I let you fall asleep.”

Daisy shakes her head. “It’s okay. I was just afraid,” she admits. “You taught me not to be.”

He bends over to kiss the top of her head.

“I don’t think I get all of this yet,” he admits. He looks _exhausted_. And happy. Alive.

“That’s fine,” Daisy tells him, hiding a stupid smile of contentment, pleasure, hope - all these new things, all these things that not her neither any other version of her had in their lives - behind the mug of coffee. “I have plenty of time to explain.”


End file.
